About
Bio
Richard W. Evans is a macroeconomist whose work sits at the intersection of public economics, computational methods, and open-source software. He is a Senior Economist at the Abundance Institutein Salt Lake City, Director and Founder of the Open Source Economics Laboratory (OSE Lab), and President and Co-Founder of Open Research Group, Inc. (OpenRG).
His research develops large-scale overlapping generations (OLG) macroeconomic models for the dynamic analysis of fiscal policy. He is a core maintainer of the open-sourceOG-Coremodel and its country calibrations — includingOG-USA — which are used by researchers and policy institutions to quantify the macroeconomic and distributional effects of tax and budget reforms.
Evans previously served as Senior Research Fellow and Director of Open Policy at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, Associate Director of the Master of Arts Program in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago, Economist at the Open Source Policy Center of the American Enterprise Institute, and Assistant Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, where he co-founded the BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory. He is a strong advocate for open-source methods, reproducibility, and transparency in economic policy analysis.
He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. He is a co-author of the forthcoming books Redesigning Aging: The Ethics and Economics of Human Longevity(Harvard University Press) and Overlapping Generations Models for Policy Analysis: Theory and Computation.
Fields of specialization
- Macroeconomics
- Public economics
- Computational economics
- International macroeconomics
Education
- Ph.D., Economics — University of Texas at Austin, 2008
- M.S., Economics — University of Texas at Austin, 2005
- M.A., Public Policy — Brigham Young University, 2003
- B.A., Economics — Brigham Young University, 1998